Reconsidering a Wehg Less Traveled: Another Look at Stündel's German Finnegan

As none of you knows javanese I will give all my easyfree translation of the old fabulist's parable.

Da keiner von euch Javanisch kann, gebe ich euch meine ganz freie Übertragung der Parabel eines alten FabelDichters.

Finnegans Wake (152.12-13) and Finnegans Wehg¹

Arguments concerning the translatability of Finnegans Wake have long turned on the question of whether there exists a "standard" from which the text should be approached. Fritz Senn, the ever-pragmatic denizen of all matters Joycean and translational, suggests that we not adopt Joyce's professed preference for "sound" over "sense"—or any other rule—too dogmatically, instead applying these as guidelines in each contextualized case.² Over and again, Senn's has been the voice reminding readers, translators, and scholars that Finnegans Wake is only an extreme case proving the rule that there can be no "good" or "bad" translation, that there is no escaping some sort of reading model, that in translation as in reading, the being of the text is less important than "what happens there."³ In calling for readers and translators to focus recursively on the minutiae of the text⁴, Senn's theory of translation as regards the Wake seems to echo the nearly contemporaneous words of T. S. Eliot—"we shall not cease from exploration . . ."⁵—even as it mirrors the Viconian structure of Joyce's own work.

Yet in discussing translation, Senn (admittedly) has a "reading model" of his own, and this is, as Patrick O'Neill has pointed out, Joyce's original text itself.⁶ That would seem to go without saying, yet various scholars have proposed what O'Neill terms an "extensive" or "transtextual" reading of translations of Joyce, which strives toward an understanding of the translation as on an even keel with the original, taking stock of how even variously "bad" translations might enrich, expand, and emend Joyce's meaning. Such an approach twists free of the concept that translations might mature along with the translators' increasing understanding and audacity (see "ALP Deutsch" 190); instead, much like the "Google Translate" system, translations' collective interest and informativity increase as their numbers increase, adding more and more idiosyncratic voices, approaches, and reading models to the collective database, which is Finnegans Wake and its satellite texts. Such a view resembles the metaphor by which Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli describes the multiple languages of the Wake itself: as part of a "translinguistic" text, where English and other languages are mutually contextualized in each other, forming "multiple meaning in a kind of mirror game."⁷ In other words, the relationship between original and translation is dynamic, enriching both in endless interpretation.

Yet where to begin translating or reading-in-translation within this ineluctable circularity? Subtly, Joyce provides an answer within his own text. At the heart of "Anna Livia Plurabelle," he replays an anecdotal meeting of French and German soldiers at the Rhine, in which a Frenchman shouts "Filou!" ("Scoundrel!"), but the German hears this in German, as "Wie viel Uhr?" ("What time is it?")—inadvertently translating and neutralizing the insult.⁸ Because of this German phrase's connection to the passage of time, Joyce places the anecdote at the moment in which the two washerwomen of his text recognize from their respective sides of their river that it is getting late and that they are turning into natural objects. Yet Joyce reverses the order of the exchange: "Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at?" (FW 213.14). Here, the innocent, epochal question translates into a sophomoric, aggressive answer. Yet here, too, are all the elements of every act of translation: its occurrence in time, its dependence on calculated misunderstanding, its aggressive appropriation of another's language, or its infection of one language with another. The German-derived question begets a near-homonymous answer in French (the sound of the German shapes the sound of the French), yet, reciprocally, the answer is a word that had by this time already been adopted into German from French.⁹ By reversing (translating) the anecdote from its original form, Joyce further exhibits the...